Conventionally, the distribution of media content, such as music, movies, and books for example, is in large part controlled by owners who are the rights-holders of the media content. In conventional systems, the media content is incorporated into a physical media such as a compact disk (CD), a digital video disk (DVD), a printed publication, and/or any other physical media. In such conventional systems, the rights-holders of the media content are able to control licensing of the media content, the production of physical media copies of the media content, and/or the distribution of the media content to customers and/or third party retailers and thereby monetize the media content.
There has been a dramatic shift in the marketplace away from media content distributed on physical media to digital media content that may be distributed via the internet. Conventionally, rights-holders of digital media content have significantly less control over the distribution of such digital media content as compared to the distribution of physical media. For example, a party that does not hold rights of the digital media content may reproduce the digital media content and then distribute the digital media content via the internet without the permission of the actual rights-holder of the digital media content. As a result, the actual-rights holder of the digital media content cannot monetize the unauthorized distribution of the digital media content.
The inability of rights-holders of digital media content to monetize the unauthorized distribution of the digital media content limits the financial gain that rights-holders of the digital media content obtain in creating the original digital media content. Often times such unauthorized distribution of the digital media content prohibits the rights-holders of the digital media from covering the costs of creating the original digital media content which discourages creation of digital media content.